In the book I argue that referentiality, communality, and algorithmicity have become the characteristic cultural forms of the digital condition because more and more people – in more and more segments of life and by means of increasingly complex technologies – are actively (voluntarily and/or compulsorily) participating in the negotiation of social meaning. They are thus reacting to the demands of a chaotic, overwhelming sphere of information and thereby contributing to its greater expansion. It is the ubiquity of these cultural forms that makes it possible to speak of the digital condition in the singular.

The goals pursued in these cultural forms, however, are as diverse, contradictory, and conflicted as society itself. It would therefore be equally false to assume uniformity or an absence of alternatives in the unfolding of social and political developments. On the contrary, the idea of a lack of alternatives is an ideological assertion that is itself part of a specific political agenda. Indeed, advanced democracies are faced with a profound choice, to continue their long slide towards post-democratic authoritarianism or reinvent democracy for the digital condition.

You can get it from the publisher (UK, US), from Amazon (UK, US), or you local bookseller (UK, US).

The great cover image is by the Dutch artist Bernaut Smilde, from the series Nimbus, Probe #6, 2010.

Marx has never, to the best of my knowledge, dealt directly with intellectual property, which is the relations and dynamics of ownership established through copyright, patent and trademark law. Rather, he focused on science, in particular on what we would call today “research and development” (R&D), which is those elements of techno-scientific innovation most directly related to the production process. He understood science as a social phenomenon organized under capitalism as wage labor, like most other activities in the production process. This, to some degree, reflects the historical circumstances of the mid 19th century. The distinction between basic and applied science was not yet fully developed, and the copyright industries were economically relatively insignificant and trademarks barely established.

Still, within a broadly Marxist viewpoint, three main perspectives can be mobilized to help understand the current role that intellectual property plays, both in the expansion of capitalism as well as in challenges to it: accumulation by dispossession, alienated labor, and general intellect.

Most of us have been drowning in emails asking us to confirm or simply continue to consent to being part of this or that mailing list, newsletter, etc.

Now that the deadline has passed and the laws are in place, it's as good a time as any to remind everyone that isn't a legal entity. It can't have (let alone enforce) a meaningful data-use or data-protection policy beyond what's stated in the footer of every nettime post, including this one. Since February of 1996, that footer has said -- 22 years ahead of the GDPR -- "no commercial use without permission."

The term agency is particular to the English language. It has, for example, no direct German equivalent. It is usually rendered by the German words Handlungsfähigkeit (ability to act), Handlungsvermögen (faculty for acting), and even Handlungsmacht (power to act). What is meant is the ability of an agent within a given situation to react not only in a predetermined way but also to influence oneself and others with a certain degree of freedom. Why, then, does this term appear in a book about the cultural public sphere and digitalization? We start from the assumption that as complex, dynamic technologies of communication play in central tole in constituting the public sphere(s), new forms of agency emerge. The digital condition thus profoundly affects the agents and dynamics in which culture is perceived and reflected. To better understand this, it makes sense to clarify the concept of agency in this context.